You really should have gotten the Game Broadcaster. You will not find a VGA capture solution with better value.

There are some good existing threads on VGA capture that are worth checking out!

My research has shown that for S-VIDEO, the old agp ati video cards with the theatre chips are amazing for s-video recording. Also they are relatively cheap. Now VGA is a horse of a different color.

Yes, I studied this thread VGA Capture Thread Unfortunately youtube links on the first page are no longer working, so I can't evaluate how good or bad the S-Video quality is.

For the Game Broadcaster I would also need some VGA splitter. S-Video seems more elegant, as these old GPUs simply clone VGA output to TV-OUT. No need for special cables.

In theory this should also work http://www.ebay.com/itm/PCI-E-HDMI-Game-Video … WEAAOSw~otWcQNL and http://www.ebay.com/itm/VGA-To-HDMI-Output-10 … dAAAOSwpRRWneT5 Too bad I didn't find any decent reviews on the HDMI capture card. And quality of the VGA->HDMI converter is also questionable.

@luckybob: Thank you, that is good to know. I have plenty of Rage theater equiped cards. 😀

Yea there is a reason they are no longer online 🤣

Keen to see what you'll end up buying and how it turns out. We need more people take a punt and try out new gear.

Investing into S-Video capturing seems like a bad bet long term, the quality just doesn't compare. There should be used VGA capturing gear out there.

There is a lot of gear out there that I would love to test, but they are quite expensive and that makes it difficult. So it's always one individual taking a punt and sharing the experience. Like Elianda with the Epiphan, I wouldn't have spent so much money on a product without his review / opinion.

Every product has also its strengths and weaknesses as well as quirks. So it's actually good to have a few devices for various situations. For example when I do long recording sessions with reboots, BIOS and resolution changes, nothing beats the VGA to HDMI scaler I got from StarTech.

S-Video is actually also very good for that.

firage wrote:

Investing into S-Video capturing seems like a bad bet long term, the quality just doesn't compare. There should be used VGA capturing gear out there.

In my case investing into S-Video is not really an issue as I already have all the needed parts right here. Except maybe S-Video cable.
I'll try to set up a recording PC and upload some S-Video tests.

@PhilsComputerLab:
The $40 HDMI capture card is tempting, yet no detailed review is available. The best I could find is this http://omracer-reviews.blogspot.cz/2014/10/hd … pture-card.html This guy claims it works fine, others say it is garbage... 🤣 Now question is where is the truth. Perhaps one day I will buy it and do some proper investigation. It doesn't seem like something better/cheaper will pop up in the near future.

//edit:
found this http://lpokeh.blogspot.ca/2014/03/review-capt … hat-i-used.html
HD72B is the cheap HDMI capture from ebay. The Input resolution table suggests it doesn't support any "PC" resolutions except 640x480. Well this is a deal breaker, apparently 800x600, 1024x768 and other common resolutions won't work. So useless for PC gaming capture it seems.

Here we go - first testing.

youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD9GamKGoHs&feature=youtu.be
original video http://hw-museum.cz/data/vogons/V3_powercolor.mkv

The quality is not very good, especially youtube made it even worse... as it wasn't bad enough to begin with. 🤣

Radeon X1900 XTX is still using the original Rage Theater, that can be found even on Rage Pro videocards. So it is kinda obsolete. Next time I'll try to capture with HD 2900 XT which should have better video chip.

Another issue is the S-Video output itself. On Voodoo3 it only begin to work once it is activated in 3dfx tools. So BIOS, Windows booting, none of that can be captured. Also the VGA output is somewhat deformed (stretched, dark) when TV-OUT is active... which makes hard to play the game.

Next VGA I tried was GF2 GTS (Asus). Video quality is more or less the same - the catch is VGA and S-Video cannot be used simultaneously. So useless for my purpose. Btw - running the game through TV-OUT add significant inputlag.

Only use S-Video (without VGA connected) to capture BIOS and everything. I used to just sit at the capture computer and work with the preview window.

A dedicated VGA to S-Video converter has a VGA splitter built in.

Since you're using a V3, you could edit your V3's driver .inf file to include 720x480, to grab some stretch-free filter-free output at that resolution

It's what i've done for this video.

You can even try using a camera on tripod... 😜

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2rbHIj6SMlF … iew?usp=sharing

leileilol wrote:

Since you're using a V3, you could edit your V3's driver .inf file to include 720x480, to grab some stretch-free filter-free output at that resolution

It's what i've done for this video.

Good idea. The problem is many games have list of supported resolutions hardcoded... and most likely 720x480 wouldn't work.

adalbert wrote:

You can even try using a camera on tripod... 😜

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2rbHIj6SMlF … iew?usp=sharing

Not bad 😀 Audio recording could be problem though. Using speakers and microphone is a no-go. And synchronizing externally recorded audio track to the video could be difficult.